1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to electronic commerce, and more specifically to electronic notifications related to shipping of physical items.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic commerce on the Internet has become commonplace. There are many merchants offering items via web sites on the Internet, and there are an even greater number of customers who purchase the items. In many cases, the customers purchase physical items, such as electronics, foodstuffs, compact disks, DVDs, and books. The merchants deliver the items to the customers using shipping companies such as the United States Postal Service (USPS), Federal Express, United Parcel Service (UPS), etc. These shippers deliver shipments to the addresses specified by the customers, usually either the customers' home or work addresses.
Many shippers require the customer or another person to be present in order to receive the shipment. Therefore, the customer must ensure that someone is at the specified address at the time of delivery. To assist the customers in their planning, the shippers provide the customers with tracking numbers for the shipments. The customers provide the tracking numbers to web sites and/or interactive voice response (IVR) telephone systems operated by the shippers and/or merchants in order to gain status information about the shipments, such as the estimated delivery dates. A customer then ensures that someone is at the address on the estimated delivery date.
One drawback to the system described above is that the status information is often not very precise. The status information might include an overly-conservative, and incorrect, delivery date prediction. Moreover, even if the delivery date prediction is correct, the status information does not provide the likely time of delivery. As a result, the person receiving the shipment must plan to remain at the delivery address for the entire day, or even for multiple days, or risk missing the delivery. This waiting can be extremely inconvenient for people who work or have other obligations that make it difficult to remain at the shipping address. One possible solution to this problem is to ship the item to the customer's work or to another address where someone is usually available to accept the shipment. However, this solution is not ideal for items that are difficult to transport.